Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
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Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#2>[...] every time I touch on the topic of tacit knowledge, inevitably someone will pop up on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit or email and protest that [...]
One of these is not like the others.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#3If, in a mood of theoretical reflection, you make articulation in written or spoken language the criterion for "knowledge", it comes as a disappointment to think of all of the cases where we speak of someone knowing something (e.g. how to ride a bike) even though they are unable to train someone to do so entirely verbally (e.g. by written instruction, or over the phone).
But adding the epicycles of "tacit knowledge" and "rules followed unconsciously" clarifies nothing. The mistake was in the overly restrictive definition of "knowledge".
I've surveyed some of the critiques of the "tacit knowledge" concept in this article:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8267598
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#4Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it.
Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. For example, to whistle, the tacit portion is the pursing of the lips, but the rest of it is music theory which can be communicated and taught using language.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#5If, in a mood of theoretical reflection, you make articulation in written or spoken language the criterion for "knowledge", it comes as a disappointment to think of all of the cases where we speak of someone knowing something (e.g. how to ride a bike) even though they are unable to train someone to do so entirely verbally (e.g. by written instruction, or over the phone). But adding the epicycles of "tacit knowledge"…
Reminds me of the "Duke of Hwan and the Wheelwright" by Zhuangzi, from Chinese philosophy; a wheelmaker can't tell you exactly how much force to apply to a wheel or the experiential parts of wheel making, you have to do it to be skilled.
https://www.mensetmanus.net/inspiration/fifteen_minutes_a_da...
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#6Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The onl…
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
-- Donald Knuth
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#7Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The onl…
“Tacit knowledge can be defined as skills, ideas and experiences that people have but are not codified and may not necessarily be easily expressed”. By that operational definition, “muscle memory only” seems to be a rather overly constrained attribution of knowledge to the typical person.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#8Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The onl…
I have multiple ABET-accredited degrees in engineering.
I learned more about how metal works in 2 months in a machine shop than i did in 4 years of undergrad and 5 years of grad school.
"Knowing that" is nice, but it is not the same as "Knowing how", and one cannot beget the other.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#9Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The onl…
This is interesting.. I've never heard of the term "tacit knowledge" before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It particularly reminds me of my experience being on-call at my last company.
Our systems were pretty unstable, and the most stressful part of the job was getting paged at 4am when everything was falling apart, customers couldn't use the app, multiple analysts would be sending messages asking "what's going on?", and as the on-call engineer, I happened to be the last line of defense (the system wasn't managed by a devops team).
In that moment, there's a lot of stuff that has to be done quickly: - orient yourself and figurate out what's going on (even in a sleep-deprived state) - prioritize mitigation over root-cause analysis - communicate early and often with the stakeholders present
This isn't stuff one can pickup by reading a "runbook". It took years of working with the systems, absorbing knowledge from my senior co-workers, and learning from past mistakes to get to a point where these priorities became in-grained in the way I approach outages.
So from my own experience, I would disagree with the definition that tacit knowledge is purely muscle memory or that it can't be improved. One's mindset can certainly evolve and I would consider that as "gaining" tacit knowledge.
I would even say something like music theory can be tacit knowledge. If you talk with musicians that do a lot of improvisation, they can certainly talk to you about music theory, but they're rarely "thinking" about music theory when they play. Just intellectually telling someone how notes/chords relate to one another doesn't transmit that "feeling" one needs to create great music.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#10This is why every attempt to "systematize all human knowledge" cannot succeed.